Ani Okkasian was the first in her family to go to college. “My parents escaped a communist country and got to the States with $700 in their pocket,” she says. And so, when she joined a TEDActive 2014 workshop held by the Robin Hood Foundation to brainstorm ways to help community college students graduate, she offered an insight from her own college experience: These students may feel like they’re floating on their own.

Community colleges offer access to higher education for more than 8 million students a year in the United States, many of them from low-income backgrounds and, like Okkasian, the first in their family to go to college. Robin Hood has identified a pattern at play on community college campuses; a large number of students require remedial classes before moving on, but only 28% of students who take them earn their degree, even 8.5 years later. Hoping to change this, Robin Hood has launched a $5 million College Success Prize—a venture capital-sized award for a technology solution to keep community college students on track to graduate in three years. The solution could help students improve their writing and problem solving, or could focus on building social and behavioral skills that are also a part of success.

It’s in the space of the social where Okkasian, who is now an adjunct professor at Woodbury University and the Marketing and Communications Manager for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, saw an opportunity. “On a fundamental level, I identify with the type of students that Robin Hood is trying to help,” she says. “I felt it was my responsibility to participate in [the TEDActive] workshop and provide insights from firsthand experience.”

The workshop began with attendees thinking about who students in remedial classes are: How old are they? What do their lives look like outside of school? What kind of access do they have to mentorship? From there, they broke into three groups for rapid-fire brainstorming, each group scrawling an intricate tangle of Post-It notes before them.

Okkasian liked that her team brought together thinkers from different backgrounds, and noticed that everyone seemed to agree on one core idea: that letting students know they are not alone could make a difference. “We chose to focus on the idea of a small learning network for the students most at risk of dropping out,” she says. “We realized that social connections could be the conduit for content that will enable these students to succeed.”

Her team’s excitement for the idea has continued, even after TEDActive. “We have some Google hangouts scheduled,” she says. “We’re excited to put the final touches on our idea and submit it for consideration.”

They have time to polish it. The College Success Prize works something like an incubator—there are three rounds, starting with an application process that’s open through the end of June 2014. Semi-finalists will receive $40,000 in funding to get their idea rolling and, in January, three finalists will be picked to receive $60,000 more in development money, along with help from consultants ideas42. These three solutions will then be tested starting in the fall of 2015 on a sample of 2,000 CUNY community college students. Over the course of a three-year trial, finalists will receive cash as they reach target goals. Any team whose solution leads to a 15 percent increase in students graduating in three years will split a grand prize of $3.5 million.

Robin Hood’s senior vice president says the idea of the challenge is to get people with interesting insights, like Okkasian, working on the problem. “Education is the silver bullet when it comes to fighting poverty, and we want the biggest thinkers, and the most innovative developers and designers to step up to the challenge,” he says.

For years now, Target has invited designers like Isaac Mizrahi (watch his TED Talk), Diane von Furstenberg (check out her TED playlist) and, most recently, abstract pattern-master Peter Pilotto to dream up collections. So when it came to creating the Target Design Café at TED2014, we knew it was going to be cool. The space […]

From age 6 through age 11, Shabana Basij-Rasikh risked her life to go to school. The Taliban had banned girls in Afghanistan from studying at universities and other educational institutions and, thus, Basij-Rasikh dressed as a boy, posing as an escort for her older sister. Together, the two would place their books in grocery bags […]

Comments (18)

sherwoodmacommented on Apr 26 2014

Reblogged this on CollegeFirst and commented:
A great reminder that there’s more than one way to get to college, and to finish.

Okay so bear with me here. This is a constant worry I have due to the economic, social, and political climate that’s quickly degrading. I’m a college undergrad, I study CIS and I write fiction. My worry is that if I try and graduate in 3yrs I will ultimately be stuck in a society that is imploding. Also I hate being part of a society that has leaders hell bent on destruction. I don’t want to stay in college in the USA because of this. I worry that if I stay in the USA I will be stuck between a rock and a hard place without much of a future. I worry about my mental safety which also effects my health. So how can anyone whom is informed want to stay in the USA and graduate? I know I would rather take my chances without a BA and travel and work outside the USA. I feel it makes no sense to create a home within a land that has a bleak future. Even if a nuke war does not happen, I still don’t want to be part of a society that is highly uninformed and does not stop the atrocities that have and will happen again. I would love a learned professional’s opinion on this. I just don’t want to support an empire/oligarchy.

I’m a college student myself, so I know how it is. Students need every bit of financial help they can get, especially from an exclusive services like this. $5 million is a HUGE number, love the post,
Thanks for Sharing

alexmos93commented on Apr 16 2014

marikent8commented on Apr 15 2014

Reblogged this on The Waiting Room and commented:
I really appreciated this- community colleges do a wonderful thing by providing education at an affordable cost to students who might not otherwise continue to pursue higher education following graduation from high school/GED attainment. There is a lot to be said for good programs that put their money where their mouths are- right where you can see it. Quite a few universities spend tuition money on flashy things that continue to benefit the school itself rather than the students directly, such as sports arenas and recruiting for athletic teams. Without that pressure, these institutions DELIVER their main goal- organizations that help them get more people to graduation are nothing short of heroic.